Eurhinosaurus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Eurhinosaurus's upper jaw was so much longer than its lower jaw that the overhang could be nearly half the total length of the skull, an extreme not seen in any other ichthyosaur.
• ✓The Posidonia Shale of southern Germany, where some of the best Eurhinosaurus material comes from, is so well-preserved that scientists have found soft-tissue outlines of ichthyosaurs showing the exact shape of their dorsal fins and tail flukes.
• ✓Eurhinosaurus is remarkably similar in shape to the modern billfish family, which includes swordfish and marlins, showing that evolution independently invented the same sword-snout design at least twice across hundreds of millions of years.
• ✓Ichthyosaurs like Eurhinosaurus gave birth to live young underwater rather than laying eggs, and scientists know this because fossilized mothers have been found with baby skeletons preserved inside them.
• ✓Despite looking and swimming like a fish or dolphin, Eurhinosaurus was neither: it was an air-breathing reptile that had to surface regularly, much like a modern dolphin but doing so in Jurassic seas filled with giant ammonites and colossal predators.